Page:Tarka the Otter.djvu/98

The Burrows fall he slid, smooth as oil. Slowly and unseen he drifted, under the chestnut tree, under the bridge, past the quiet railway station, the orchards, the meadows, and so to the pill-head. The current dropped him into the basin of the fish-pass, and carried him down the slide to salt water. With the ebb he floated by ketches and gravel barges, while ring-plover and little stints running at the line of lapse cried their sweet cries of comradeship. The mooring kegs bobbed and turned in the ebb, the perches, tattered with sea-weed, leaned out of the trickling mud of the fairway, where curlew walked, sucking up worms in their long curved bills. Tarka rode on with the tide. It took him into the estuary, where the real sea was fretting the sandbanks. He heard a whistle, and answered it gladly. Greymuzzle was fishing in the estuary, and calling to White-tip.

The old otter, patient in life after many sorrows and fears, caressed his bitten face and neck and licked his hurts. They hunted together, and slept during the day in a drain in one of the dykes of the marsh, which was watered by a fresh stream from the hills l3dng northwards. Night after night they hunted in the sea, and often when the tide was low they played in the Pool opposite the fishing village that was built around the base of a hill. The north-east wind blew cold over the pans and sandy hillocks near the sea, but Gre3miuzzle knew a warm sleeping place in a clump of round-headed club-rush, near the day-hide of a bittern. She became dear to Tarka, and gave him fish as though he were her cub, and in the course of time she took him for her mate.